@Heather - that is why pedophile priests get away with what they are doing.

@Anthony Christian - in my day! as primary school kids, we were forced to go to confession, and if one didn't go to catholic school, we were forced to go to catechism classes after church.

Things have changed,so, yes Anthony, been there, done that - it was insidious then, it is insidious now. I know catholics, now, that go to confession, , if they say ten hail mary's and two our fathers, all is forgiven. As a child, I made 'sins' up. Didn't really know what a sin was, until I started reading the bible.

I am not sure that I sin any more. Since I don't have a 'lord', taking his/its name in vane seems nothing more than residual social conditioning and limited creativity.

When something bad happens, it is not because of a fiendish desire to cause trouble, but mostly because I am not very good at doing mental computations and simulations perfectly. It really helps to have a very good understanding of physics before you do something, and during your expectations of effect.

I honor my mother, but dad is not here any more, so family memory, no matter how twisted, is fair game.

Murder as an option, never comes up. If I think unclean thoughts, it is mostly because the house needs to be vacuumed.

False witness, I leave that to other folks that are better at it, like theists.

I work 7 days a week, unless I am tired, or my wife gives me a hint. If I keep a sabath, it is random, with a nice sleep in.

Once, when I was a teenager, I remember going to confession and having the priest try to drag more out of me. I used the screen, because face-to-face was for charlatans (if it's not shame, you're not a real Catholic), but he could apparently still tell I was a teenage boy, because after confessing to theft and so on and so forth, he was like:

"Anything else?"

And I was like, "Uhhh, no?"

"You sure? You're not forgetting anything?"

"Nope, I think... I think that's it."

"Really? No bad thoughts?"

I seriously had to think hard about this. "Bad... thoughts?" How could a thought be bad? I didn't get it. Was he asking if I'd thought about hurting someone?

"Any dirty, or unclean thoughts." He said this casually and, in hindsight quite shockingly, I was still oblivious to what he was talking about.

"... No. I can't think of anything."

"Okay," he sounded like he'd given up, "Well, why don't you do 25 Hail Marys and if you think of anything, you know, just try to be mindful of it in the future."

The kicker is, I hadn't lied. I wasn't even thinking unclean thoughts at that point in my life. I was weird like that. But in retrospect, there's a whole bunch wrong with a grown man asking a child if they're having unclean thoughts...

That is one of Catholicism's greatest weapons against humanity: guilt. People having to drudge up their "sins" and admit them before someone of "authority" (using the term jokingly where it refers to self-righteous priests) makes them more submissive to the church, giving them more and more artificial power over people's lives.

Like a prayer and an 'official' pardon can make a wrong right. How about making reparations to those you've wronged? Apology? Doing an act of goodwill to balance things out if you can't directly address the wrong?